Gates - Crowley: All right, everybody, let’s all cool off.

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All right, everybody, let’s all cool off

AS A resident of the People’s Republic of Cambridge for nearly a quarter century, the spectacularly bad hair day of Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cambridge Police Sergeant James Crowley hits me as an amazing case of how two people steeped in race can combust. A pessimist could easily go down a dark worm hole in an incident where a PBS-producing, Oxford-encyclopedia-writing black Harvard professor with nearly 50 honorary degrees was hauled out of his own home in handcuffs after a 911 call over a suspected burglary.

After all, this comes on the heels of African-American and Latino children being disinvited from a suburban Philadelphia swimming pool. It comes at a time when the fissures of structural inequality have widened again into full fractures, with black men, even college-educated black men, losing jobs in the recession in the Northeast at much higher rates than everyone else. It comes as police profiling and the stereotype of black men as criminals are still very real, even if African-American men run the White House, Massachusetts, and New York.

So if you want bad news to confirm a view that racial change in America is only frosting on a still-rotten cake, plenty of it still abounds.

Proving that life is stranger than fiction, Crowley was chosen by a former African-American police commissioner of Cambridge to share his sensitivity skills with other cops on racial profiling. To boot, he tried in vain in 1993 to save dying black Celtics basketball star Reggie Lewis. But in a doomsday scenario, two otherwise intelligent men, one who is paid to size up situations in nanoseconds and the other who is renowned for deep historical probings, likely found a way to push each other’s buttons of race and class. The resulting divide has Gates calling Crowley a “rogue policeman’’ while Crowley is pleading, “I’m not a monster or the bigot or racist that he’s portrayed me to be.

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Based on my experience, the Cambridge police, precisely because of the town’s progressive politics, are noteworthy in not arresting or not incarcerating people unless necessary. In one incident, when I called them to break up teen rowdiness in a neighbor’s home, they calmly gave the youth a chance to come out. It all ended with IDs taken, party ended, and no arrests.

That does not mean Gates did not get a traumatic, raw deal. He did. Luckily for him, his power to command national attention was equal to Crowley’s power to arrest. Now, after nearly a week of incendiary charges back and forth, it is time for this scholar on race and the cop who teaches on racial profiling to show how smart they truly are. Perhaps the next PBS special produced by Gates should be of him and Crowley discussing how it all went wrong. That might help the rest of us get it all right.

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[MannyGoldstein]

1. Thank You

Good post. As a nearby resident to Cambridge (Newton), I have a hard time that the Cambridge PD is a bunch racist thugs.

Although we still don't know what actually happened - I hope that the 911 and Police communications tapes are released, and that they shed some light.

[noiretextatique]

2. this is a learning opportunity

not something to be swept away and forgotten, things will never change until incidents like this one are rightly viewed as patterns instead of mistakes. there is no need to demonize the police officer or gates, but there is a great need to openly and honestly discuss the pattern. i am glad both parties are willing to do that. i agree with the author.

[MUAD_DIB]

3. Nicely put. Kick and Rec.